Botswana 101

     The loss of my iPad increasingly appears to be permanent.  This has caused me to have the weird sensation that the trip didn't exist.  As an old friend (whose camera was permanently embedded in her hand) once said, "If I didn't get a picture, it didn't happen."
     Well, that may be sort of funny, but it's nonsense of course, so I will try to paint a picture of the trip with words only for the time being and perhaps supplement the words later with either my found pictures or else other people's pictures.
     I think I should say a few words about how I came to be travelling to Botswana in the first place.
    As the most faithful among you readers know, last year I travelled to South Africa, and while I loved working with the animals and admired many of the people at the Project, I was troubled by the lack of interaction among people.  It appeared to my oh-so-politically-correct eyes that, while the institution of apartheid was obviously dead and buried, there remained a strictly-observed hierarchy in the races, and while I frequently was working side-by-side with local blacks, we never so much as made eye contact with one another.  It was like the two races lived in parallel, but yet definitely separate universes and that all possible power and privilege was still the exclusive prerogative of the whites.
    Now, I MUST add that in all fairness, this is not something that I as an American can afford to feel superior about.  After all, we Americans treated OUR indigenous peoples considerably worse than South Africa treated theirs.  The South Africans relegated them to legally inferior status;  we did that and much more by "simply" wiping virtually all of them out.
     I had heard that Botswana was different from South Africa in that since its independence in the 1960's, it has been governed--truly governed--by black presidents of unimpeachable integrity and statesmanship, and that as a result, the black majority population was truly empowered there and as a result, race relations were much easier.  I wanted to see if that was true.
     And a much more mundane reason, is that I had, through the intervention of a friend, become a devoted fan of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels.  I love these books! and they portrayed a country of such admirably easy peaceful human interaction, that I wanted to see if that was true.
     Mind you, I was only in Botswana for three weeks, and I saw only a small part of the country and met only a few of its citizens, but you know what?  From what I could see, IT'S ALL TRUE!